Extra weight may impede a person’s response to the coronavirus and a future vaccine.
A recent report in The New York Times sheds light on the challenges that people living with obesity may face when they encounter the coronavirus.
Writer Katherine J. Wu reports on a variety of studies showing that people with extra weight are more susceptible than others to severe bouts of COVID-19. Researchers have found, for example, that:
- People with obesity who were infected by the coronavirus were more than twice as likely to end up in the hospital and nearly 50% more likely to die of COVID-19.
- More than 77% of the nearly 17,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients in the United States had excess weight or obesity.
Unfortunately, controlling weight is not a quick fix, especially in communities with limited access to healthy food and opportunities for exercise.
“If we don’t address these social underpinnings, I think we’ll continue to see a recurrence of what is happening now,” said Dr. Jennifer Woo Baidal, a pediatric weight management specialist at Columbia University.
The physical reasons for elevated COVID risk among people living with obesity are varied.
On the mechanical side, large amounts of fat can compress the lower parts of the lungs, making it harder for them to expand when people breathe in, reports Wu. The blood of people with obesity seems to be more prone to clotting, plugging up blood vessels and starving tissues of oxygen. Fat can send out hormones and other signals that make nearby cells “go haywire.”
Fat also subdues the body’s initial immune response to the coronavirus, allowing the pathogen to spread unchecked. When the body’s immune system finally kicks in, immune cells go berserk, causing uncontrolled bouts of inflammation that reduce the immune system’s ability to generate cells that remember past encounters with pathogens.
This “pathogen amnesia” has big implications for a potential vaccine.
“Some products might not work at all in people carrying extra weight,” writes Wu.